Teacher: Vicente Forés
Course: Filología Inglesa
I
Harold Pinter, Party
Time
Almeida Theatre, London, 31st
October 1991
Directed by Harold
Pinter
Almeida Theatre Company:
Peter Howitt as
“Terry”
Barry Foster as
“Gavin”
Cordelia Roche as
“Dusty”
Dorothy Tutin as
“Melissa”
Tacye Nichols as
“Liz”
Nicola Pagett as
“Charlotte”
Roger Lloyd Pack as
“Fred”
Gawn Grainger as
“Douglas”
Harry Burton as
“Jimmy”
This
play has many characters: Terry, Gavin, Dusty, Melissa, Liz, Charlotte,
Fred,
Douglas and Jimmy (and a waiter). Gavin is a man in his fifties, he is
the host
of the flat where a party takes place, he has met the rest of the guests in
this party, he plays golf, and he owns a boat; Terry is a man of forty,
he is
an upper-class person who is a member of a prestigious private club, he is
married with his young wife Dusty, and he is always angry when his wife
tells
something; Dusty is a woman in her twenties, she has a brother called Jimmy,
and she is married with her husband Terry; Melissa is a woman of
seventy, she
is a member of the same club Terry is; Liz is a woman in her thirties,
she is
married with her husband Douglas; Charlotte is a woman in her thirties,
she is
a widow (her husband died), she is really good-looking, and she had met Fred
before; Fred is a man in his forties, he seems to be a very simple man
which is
not so handsome, and he had met Charlotte before; Douglas is a man of
fifty, he
is a multimillionaire who owns an island, and he is married with Liz;
Jimmy is
a young man, he is thinly dressed and very insignificant, he is Dusty’s
brother
and he has disappeared misteriously.
The
play has only one stage: Gavin’s flat (with sophisticated furniture I
suppose),
with sofas, armchairs, etc., with people sitting and standing, and there is
waiter, he has a drinks tray, but nobody talks with him, he is like another
piece of furniture. There are two doors too, one of them is half open in a
vague light. And there is a very dynamic music. The closed atmosphere is
always
the same, but the change of scenes is determined by the characters
iluminated
by the lights, for example, at the beginning of the play the lights
iluminate
Terry and Gavin in their dialogue.
This
play shows an upper-class party, whose characters are always talking about
snubb themes like going to private clubs with tennis games and swimming,
etc.,
discussing their political tendencies, or celebrating more wealthy
parties woth
well-dressed guests, etc. All that climax seems to be paused when
appears the
person of Jimmy, a spectre from the terrible world that the rest of
characters
do not know, the real world.
All
the action occur very quickly, and they are coherent, it seems to be at
night,
there are no brackets and no temporal jumps, with the exception of the pause
occured while Jimmy’s appearance; it seems to be a crossroad, that is
because
there are no temporal references, but it seems to be a time of a war
conflict
(“…there’s not a soul in sight, apart from
some…soldiers…”).
The
language used is often a cutivated language (I think that this is often in
Harold Pinter’s plays), because the presence of upper-class characters;
however,
we have to pay attention with the colloquialisms used sometimes by some
characters to give intensity to message (in jokes, for example) like
“…The
only thing she doesn’t like on boats is being fucked on
boats…”.